Evidence of the continued, three-decade flight of residents is easy to see in the classrooms of Toledo Public and Washington Local schools.

School system prognosticators, grappling with budget requests each year, make enrollment predictions in terms of shrinkage, which translates to $6,100 in state aid lost per child, said Dan Burns, the Toledo district's chief business manager.

"Not only is Toledo losing population, but you will also find people are moving out of the state," he said. "We've lost, in the last several years, 10,000 students. There's somewhere around 7,000 of those students in charter schools," Mr. Burns said. "So the question is, where are the other 3,000 students?"

Toledo dropped in population from 304,734 in July, 2004, to 301,285 by July, 2005, according to the bureau.

But it was not alone in the Buckeye State and it was not the worst.

Cincinnati was second in the nation in population loss, declining from 313,860 to 308,728, a 1.6 percent loss, over the same period. Cleveland came in eighth, moving from 458,080 to 452,208, a 1.3 percent drop, and Detroit was sixth, moving from 899,122 to 886,671 residents, or by 1.4 percent.

Mr. Burns projected a loss of 1,500 students for the current school year. He was off by 87 percent, with the school system registering a loss of 2,700 students, he said.

Declining enrollment might affect where new schools will be built and how much new school construction there can be, he said.

"A lot of the voters were told, we were going to build schools in their neighborhoods. We may have to go back and tell them, 'Gee, we don't have enough students,' " he said.

Some elected officials and community leaders said yesterday that Toledo's reliance on income taxes was to blame for flight.

Others said the housing stock was antiquated and wasn't inviting to new residents. Some also said there are misconceptions that persist about Toledo as dangerous or inferior.

"It's an indication that taxes are too high in Toledo," said Councilman Frank Szollosi as he walked out of yesterday's council meeting. At the meeting, council received a report about its credit rating, determined recently by several independent agencies.

Standard & Poor's, one of the credit rating agencies, mentioned Toledo's long population decline as a concern in its written summary.

"Over the past three decades, as the local economy shifted, the city lost 18 percent of its population, but city management feels population has stabilized due, in part, to development in the downtown area," the report said.

Though a vocal critic of Mayor Carty Finkbeiner and current job-creation efforts, Mr. Szollosi agreed that there has been good news lately, with investments announced for a General Motors Powertrain project and also DaimlerChrysler's investment in the Jeep plant.

"They are right, in a way, but there is more we have to do," he said.

Council President Rob Ludeman said that taxes are not driving families away; it's the perception of Toledo schools and neighborhoods.

"It's always a concern if you have a shrinking population," he said. "Your tax base tends to shrink along with it.

"Folks are drawn out to the suburbs. I think if we focus on business in the city of Toledo, you should have people working here," he said.

Bob Savage, a private consultant who served on the Toledo Plan Commission for eight years until this year, said Midwest populations have steadily been moving into suburbs.

"It's not like we lost 5 percent of our population. Most of the Midwestern cities are spreading out," he said. "The new housing around here, most of it's been in the suburbs. But that's not any different than any other city. We've certainly tried.

"Economic development is a hard thing to do, and not everything you do is going to work," he said. "If everything we were doing worked, that would mean we only tried one or two things."

Contact Christopher D. Kirkpatrick

at: ckirkpatrick@theblade.com

or 419-724-6077.

First Published June 21, 2006, 10:38 a.m.